3. "About the same time a respectable Lesbian who conducted a Villa Venus
at Souvenir, the beautiful Missouri spa, throttled with her own hands (she had
been a Russian weightlifter) two of her most beautiful and valuable charges. It
was all rather sad."
4.‘You
must not press me for the details of our sweet torrid and horrid nights
together, before and between that poor guy and the next intruder. If my skin
were a canvas and her lips a brush, not an inch of me would have remained
unpainted and vice versa. Are you horrified, Van? Do you loathe
us?’
‘On the contrary,’ replied Van, bringing off a passable imitation of
bawdy mirth. ‘Had I not been a heterosexual male, I would have been a
Lesbian.’
5. " ‘Pah!’
uttered Ada.
‘She put me in a most embarrassing situation. I can quite understand her being
mad at Dorothy (who meant well, poor stupid thing — stupid enough to warn me
against possible "infections" such as "labial lesbianitis." Labial
lesbianitis!) but that was no reason for Lucette to look up Andrey in town
and tell him she was great friends with the man I had loved before my
marriage.
B. One reference to "Lesbie" ( La Lesbie de
Catulle, Claudia):
"and here Mlle Larivière came down for coffee and recollections of Van as
a bambin angélique who adored à neuf ans — the precious dear! —
Gilberte Swann et la Lesbie de Catulle (and who had learned, all by
himself, to release the adoration as soon as the kerosene lamp had left the
mobile bedroom in his black nurse’s fist)."
C. Finally I
discovered one reference to "Bilitis" ( a "falsification", "hoax" or a
"pastiche" written in 1894 by Pierre-Félix Louis, i.e "Pierre Louys",
following Meleagrus and presented as "translations from the Greek". Louyis
only confessed that he himself had written the entire poem in 1925 on
his death-bed) and an indirect mention at "Mytilène" on pages 131
and 154 in "Ada or Ardor", Penguin Edition.
1. "...good Ida, far from abandoning Marina, with whom she had been
platonically and irrevocably in love ever since she had seen her in ‘Bilitis,’
accused herself of neglecting Lucette by overindulging in Literature;
consequently she now gave the child, in spurts of vacational zeal, considerably
more attention than poor little Ada (said Ada) had received at twelve, after
her first (miserable) term at school. Van had been such an idiot;
suspecting Cordula! Chaste, gentle, dumb, little Cordula de Prey, when Ada had
explained to him, twice, thrice, in different codes, that she had invented
a nasty tender schoolmate, at a time when she had been literally torn
from him, and only assumed — in advance, so to speak — such a girl’s
existence."
2. "Nothing whatever of all that (yes — Mytilène, petite isle, by
Louis Pierre) seemed to apply to Cordula, who wore a ‘garbotosh’ (belted
mackintosh) over her terribly unsmart turtle and held both hands deep in her
pockets as she challenged his stare."
D. Pierre Louys
original poem was very successful but it had been accepted as a discovery
by the hellenists and praised as such. I suppose that this irony would not
have escaped V. Nabokov.
There are four textual references to Louys work and they all
came from the first poem ( "The
Tree"). I think that Nabokov returned to Louys indirectly, but
profoundly, since I can find a certain paralel between the development
of Ada and Van´s affair and the story of the loves of Bilitis (at first at the
land of the "nymphs", later in Lesbos and, finally, in
Cyprus).
At least, the first part that describes Van and Ada´s falling in love
takes place in Ardis, initially around the "Shattal tree" - as
indicated by Louys "The Tree" . Later, Van and Ada are separated and
she begins (or makes up) a series of lesbian affairs. This second chapter
is pointed out by VN when he writes about Mytilene. The third part would have us
find both Van and Ada having various lovers of any age and gender until they are
finally united. Billitis, of course, is dead more or less at
fourty and here the paralel ends. We also have no information about a little
girl being born to Van and Ada after their first experience in
Ardis...
We have an indication that Mlle Larivière de Montparnasse, whose maiden name is
Ida suggests both the Parnassus and Mount Ida ( Greece), feels a lesbian
platonic love towards Marina and, perhaps, seduces Lucette.
Van and Ada have a "small island" in Ardis. And yet, according to
Louys, Mitilene was a penninsula, not an island and the capital of
Lesbos.
I think that Van's erotic dreams (or hallucinatory events) at
Villa Venus return to the orgies found in Louys poems ( both second and,
mainly, the third parts)
"Les Chansons de Bilitis" is divided into four chapters and an
introduction. The first one is named "Bucoliques en Pamphylie" ( with an
epigraph by Teocritus), the second is "Élégies à Mytiléne" ( with an epigraph by
Sappho) with a description of her lesbian affair with Mnasidika. The
third is "Épigrammes dans l'Isle de Chypre" ( epigraph by Filodemus). Next
we find another chapter named "Le Tombeau de Bilitis" ( the tomb of Bilitis)
with three epitaphs.
The part that describes the "small island (?) of
Mytilène" deals with her total immersion in homosexual love, since her
loves had been betrayed and frustrated.In contrast, in the poem´s first
part we find a very young virgin prey to her first sexual stirrings, still
undirected toward boys, that finds love in a young man who, then, rapes her
and leaves her with child ( Pannychis) whom Bilitis later abandons to
travel to Mytiléne. In the third part, Bilitis becomes
bisexually inclined and lives as a rich
courtesan.
In "Ada", following the "The Tree" poem in the first part we have
references to the "Shattal tree":
1.
"The child tried to assuage the rash in the sort arch, with all its
accompaniment of sticky, itchy, not altogether unpleasurable sensations, by
tightly straddling the cool limb of a Shattal apple tree, much to Van’s disgust
as we shall see more than once. Besides the lolita, she wore a short-sleeved
white black-striped jersey..."
2. One afternoon they were climbing the glossy-limbed shattal tree at the
bottom of the garden. Mlle Larivière and little Lucette (...)
Van, in
blue gym suit, having worked his way up to a fork just under his agile playmate
(who naturally was better acquainted with the tree’s intricate map) but not
being able to see her face, betokened mute communication by taking her ankle
between finger and thumb as she would have a closed butterfly. Her bare
foot slipped, and the two panting youngsters tangled ignominiously among the
branches, in a shower of drupes and leaves, clutching at each other, and the
next moment, as they regained a semblance of balance, his expressionless face
and cropped head were between her legs and a last fruit fell with a thud — the
dropped dot of an inverted exclamation point. She was wearing his wristwatch and
a cotton frock.
(‘Remember?’/‘Yes,
of course, I remember: you kissed me here, on the inside —’ /‘And you started to strangle me with those devilish knees of yours —’
‘I was
seeking some sort of support.’)/ That
might have been true, but according to a later (considerably later!) version
they were still in the tree, and still glowing, when Van removed a silk thread
of larva web from his lip(...)
3.
" Then Van and
Ada met in the
passage, and would have kissed at some earlier stage of the Novel’s Evolution in
the History of Literature. It might have been a neat little sequel to the
Shattal Tree incident. "
4." During that midsummer week or fortnight, notwithstanding those daily
butterfly kisses on that hair, on that neck, Van felt even farther removed from
her than he had been on the eve of the day when his mouth had accidentally come
into contact with an inch of her skin hardly perceived by him sensually in the
maze of the shattal tree."